Robert Pippin reviews Slavoj Žižek’s Less than Nothing, a serious attempt to re-actualize Hegel in the light of Lacanian metapsychology. But does Žižek’s attempt to think Hegel with Lacan produce, as Žižek hopes, a political figuration adequate to the present? Or does it land us rather in the Hegelian zoo, along with such well-known specimens as the Beautiful Soul, the Unhappy Consciousness, and The Knight of Virtue?

A veteran of the São Paulo theater scene reflects on the practice and theory of independent theater groups in a period of social disintegration.

Andrew Pendakis reviews Michael Berubé’s The Left at War.

Jackson Petsche explores the positive potential, for the present moment, of “l’art pour l’art,” as mobilized by the Decadent writers of the fin de siècle. Petsche’s essay is the winner of the 2010 Michael Sprinker Graduate Writing Competition, which recognizes an essay or dissertation chapter that engages with Marxist theory, scholarship, pedagogy, or activism.

Milton Ohata reviews Luiz Felipe de Alencastro’s O trato dos viventes: Formação do Brasil no Atlântico Sul [Mortal Traffic: The Formation of Brazil in the South Atlantic]. O trato dos viventes begins from a simple but consequential premise: that in the history of Portuguese America, the whole is not the sum of its parts; that is, it cannot be understood by merely combining the histories of its various regimes. Rather, local history is to be interpreted in the light of its (...) effective connections, in reciprocal determination, with the history of capitalism — in which the slave trade played an indispensible part. (shrink)